Energy cascades as branching processes with emphasis on neveu's approach to derrida's random energy model

Continuous-space-time branching processes (CSBP) are investigated in order to model random energy cascades. CSBPs are based on spectrally positive Levy processes and, as such, are characterized by their corresponding Laplace exponents. Special emphasis is put on the CSBPs of Feller, Lamperti and Neveu and on their Poisson point process representations. The Neveu model (either supercritical or subcritical) is of particular interest in physics for its connection with the random energy model of Derrida, as revisited by Ruelle. Exploiting some connections between the partition functions of energy and the Poisson-Dirichlet distributions of Pitman and Yor, some information on the zero-temperature limit is extracted. Finally, for the subcritical versions of the three models, we compute the distribution of some of their interesting features: extinction time and probability, area under the profile (total energy) and width (maximal energy).